2010

Cleta Mitchell, “Fairly Substantial” Due Diligence and Muslim Brotherhood Influence Peddling at the American Conservative Union

By WILLIAM MAYER

February 18, 2014 – San Francisco, CA – PipeLineNews.org – Last week the Center for Security Policy [CSP, an influential DC based national security think tank run by former Assistant Secretary of Defense, Frank Gaffney] released a scathing report - The Case Against Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan - in which the organization leveled the serious accusation that the American Conservative Union [ACU] has been infiltrated by Muslim Brotherhood operatives, specifically, Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan.

Forward:

As a general proposition, the contention that the ACU has been ideologically compromised shouldn’t be surprising in the least because as presently constituted it’s at best a faux conservative organization, chaired by one of Washington’s top pro-amnesty lobbyists, Alberto Cardenas of Cardenas Partners, which plays both sides of the aisle.

“This will take some courage...There are some members who say: ‘You know what, I only have 5 percent Hispanics in my district. Why get burned on the issue politically? My answer to them is: ‘Well, why be in Congress? You're supposed to be our public servant. You're supposed to be courageous. You're supposed to take a firm line on issues that need your assistance as a public servant to pass the right laws...To do what's politically convenient and expedient is not deserving of the state or the country right now. We need leaders in Congress who can show some courage and can show some conviction.” [source, Todd Beaman, John Bachman, Al Cardenas: True Immigration Reform Takes 'Courage', NewsMax]

Next to Cardenas, Carl Chidlow is probably the senior ranking member of the firm:

“…Chidlow has spent the past 18 years working in Democratic politics and has developed and maintained extensive relationships with key staff and elected officials in the National party…Chidlow worked for…Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) for over two years…Mr. Chidlow joined the Presidential campaign of Massachusetts Senator John Kerry…also served as a campaign consultant to US Senator Patty Murray (D-Washington)…and Democratic Majority Leader Tom Daschle…” [source, Cardenas Partners, Team]

[Editor's note: Infiltration aside, we think a very good case can be made that the ACU has moved so far to the left that it's out of step with the grassroots Constitutionalist movement and really doesn't deserve the prestige of hosting major conservative conferences or conventions.]

In order to comprehend the enormity of CSP’s case against the ACU it must be realized that the matter takes place against a backdrop in which the government of the United States has been similarly compromised over a period of time spanned by many presidential administrations, gaining its first foot-hold during the Clinton years, picking up serious momentum post 9/11 and culminating with the Muslim Brotherhood friendly administration of Barack Hussein Obama.

For example in 2012, then FBI Director Robert Mueller, responding to a massive stealth jihad campaign undertaken by radical American Muslim organizations including at least one Muslim Brotherhood/HAMAS front group [the Islamic Society of North America, see William Mayer, Terror Associated ISNA Promoting Sketchy Islamic “Charity” Islamic Relief USA , PipeLineNews.org] met with those groups to announce that “anti-Muslim” [meaning accurate] instructional material had been purged from federal law enforcement training classes:

“After complaints from some Muslim and Arab-American groups, the FBI has pulled more than 700 documents and 300 presentations that stereotyped Islam or were factually inaccurate, an FBI spokesman said. The federal agency also intends in coming weeks to roll out plans on how it will vet training materials....” [source, Niraj Wariko, FBI ditches training materials criticized as anti-Muslim, USA Today]

According to a PR statement from ISNA - now pulled from the organization’s website but archived in many ‘Net locations:

“In a continuing effort to address concerns related to inflammatory training material, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recently met with community and interfaith organizations to provide an update on steps taken by the agency to rectify the matter. On Wednesday, February 8, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), the Arab American Institute (AAI), Interfaith Alliance, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Muflehun, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF), and the Shoulder-to-Shoulder campaign had an opportunity to discuss the matter with the Public Affairs Office of the FBI. Director Robert Mueller joined the meeting to discuss these matters with the representatives from the organizations. [source, Bo Perrin, ISNA & Nat. Orgs. Meet with FBI Dir. to Discuss Biased FBI Training Materials , the Counter Jihad Report]

Below President Obama sending a video greeting to the terror linked ISNA, using the ritual Arabic greeting, “as-salamu alaykum,” peace be upon you.

September 2013 “Mr. Norquist also serves on the board of directors of…the American Conservative Union…”

But it appears that as 2014 approached, Mr. Norquist was no longer listed. We have no opinion as to the reason why this apparently has taken place except in noting that recently Mr. Norquist has become more controversial.

Though he has been quite active in the ACU, 16 years ago, according to the Center for Security Policy’s study, “Shariah: The Threat to America” Norquist was partnering with an unsavory Islamist, Abdurahman Alamoudi:

Alamoudi, a high ranking Muslim Brotherhood operative, gained access to the Clinton White House during the 1990’s after having founded the American Muslim Council. His influence there quickly grew, providing a corridor for Islamists to access America’s locus of power. Part of Alamoudi's legacy is that he was assigned the task by Team Clinton to vet Muslim military chaplains, one can only wonder how many MB sleepers he placed as a result of that level of access.

In the late nineties Alamoudi provided funding to Grover Norquist, which he used to create the Islamic Free Market Institute, a vehicle designed to – in a manner similar to Alamoudi’s influence operation within the Clinton administration – penetrate the political right, intending to destroy it from the inside.

“Alamoudi provided at least $20,000 in checks enabling Republican activist Grover Norquist to establish what would become a Muslim Brotherhood front organization targeted at penetrating GOP circles and the presidential campaign of then Governor George W. Bush. The new entity was called the Islamic Free Market Institute…with Norquist as the Chairman of the Board.”

Though the Islamic Free Market Institute [IFMI] was chaired by Norquist, its Executive Director was Khaled Saffuri, Alamoudi’s right hand man. Saffuri’s boss, Alamoudi was also named in the List of Unindicted Co-conspirators and/or Joint Venturers attendant to the U.S. vs. Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror funding prosecution, identified as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. This provides another link between the MB and Norquist, Saffuri being his cohort in the IMFI.

Below a video of Alamoudi, attending a anti-Israel rally in Washington's Lafayette Park, held in 2000. Alamoudi can clearly be heard stating his support for both HAMAS, the Muslim Brotherhood created terrorist group responsible for killing over 1,000 Israelis, mostly women and children and Hezbollah, Iran's proxy terrorist army.

With all of the progress he had been making, it must have seemed to Alamoudi that he had established himself as a demi-king maker when it all came crashing down. In 2003 he was arrested in England with nearly $350,000 in cash stowed in his luggage, courtesy of then Libyan dictator Qaddafi. The money was to be used in funding a plot to assassinate then Prince, now King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia.

Extradited, he was tried and convicted of providing material aid to the FTO al-Qaeda, he is now serving a 23 year prison sentence.

But the pathway into the Oval Office made possible by Alamoudi/Norquist once having been established provided entre into both the GW Bush and Barack Obama administrations.

Curiously, or perhaps not, given the cultural drift which has taken place in the U.S. post 9/11, the Brotherhood’s influence expanded instead of waning, to the point where it's no longer controversial for a President of the United States to warmly greet a proven Muslim Brotherhood front-group, ISNA.

The ACU Suborns CPAC Conference:

Incredibly despite having what one might think was a fatal political impediment – a close associate having been convicted of rasing over $1M for al-Qaeda terrorism - it proved nothing of the sort for Norquist whose organization, Americans for Tax Reform, founded in 1985, continued to provide him with stature within the political right and access to huge amounts of money.

One of the lessons demonstrated here is that once one has established high level political access/credentials, money will usually follow, and often in large amounts. Another attribute of this phenomenon is the insular clubby nature of "official" DC. These people do business, eat, drink and sleep together; once you are in, a threat against one is often taken as a threat against the whole and the wagons are circled.

Being able to dispense “walking around” money is certainly one form of power, but perhaps even more important is the ability to control political agendas. Such has been the case at the yearly Conservative Political Action Committee [CPAC] conference [this year held on March 6-8 in DC] which just happens to be run by the American Conservative Union, where Norquist seems to still have quite a bit of juice.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons why the conference has almost none of its content devoted to the nuts and bolts of national security matters, and none dealing with the driver of terrorism, political Islam.

Noting that deafening absence, CPAC 2013 became the scene of a pitched battle between CPAC leadership and a small but committed band of anti-jihad activists who crashed the gates refusing to allow the topic to be ignored.

About this, the Center for Security Policy’s Christine Brim had much to say, interviewed by Front Page Magazine.

“…Brim attributed to CPAC 2013 a “deeply dangerous” outlook of living in the “best of all possible worlds” famously manifested by Voltaire’s thinker Pangloss in Candide. Some CPAC panels even had “whether or not we should defend America” as a theme…Brim wanted CPAC to return…to Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” formula…In particular, Brim complained of a “token number” of national security discussions at CPAC. Indeed, the CPAC schedule reveals that only six panels (3% of the total, including one about military voting) had any relevance to national security, while 68 other panels covered assorted social, economic, and political organizing issues…Almost completely missing from CPAC’s schedule was any discussion of a global authoritarian and aggressive Islamist threat, something disappointing many CPAC attendees…”

In protest of CPAC’s censorship a “Panel of the Uninvited,” sponsored by the Breitbart news organization gathered together some of the bright light anti-jihadist spokesmen, among them former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Frank Gaffney, Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller.

This assemblage of CPAC “outcasts” provided the only recognition at the conference of the danger to American national security posed by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Shari’a inspired “civilization jihad, “ which is intended to subvert and hollow out the institutions which would normally be counted among the first to resist a totalitarianism based upon a savage 7th century Islamic world view where the globe is divided into two parts, the land of Islam, Dar-al-Islam, and the non-Muslim land of war, Dar-al-Harb.

Absent these few rebels, CPAC rather than being the vibrant soul of a revitalized Reaganism based on American exceptionalism and peace through strength, the conference did a great disservice to its 10,000 plus attendees, spoon feeding them pablum, the moderate GOP Beltway vision of defeatism and a waning of America’s moral force instead of confronting our greatest challenges head on.

So with the foregoing in mind we turn to Cleta Mitchell a highly placed DC attorney and partner in Foley & Lardner LLP. She is also a longtime official of the ACU, specifically having served as the Chairman of the ACU Foundation. Mitchell, rather abruptly gave up that position in the Fall of 2013 . Though still active in ACU her departure from this public role seems to coincide with the difficulty of finding any mention on the ACU website that Grover Norquist is a member of the group’s Board of Directors.

Some might conclude that these two personalities might have been judged too “radioactive” to be so prominently linked to the ACU. Though we do note that Suhail Khan remains listed on that part of ACU’s website, it’s Norquist and now Mitchell [injecting herself into the matter] who are currently in the media spotlight.

[Editor’s note: We have for purposes of keeping this document to a reasonable length not dealt with Suhail Khan’s numerous entanglements with radical Islam. We will observe however that the CSP study provides a brief condensation of Khan’s connections to Islamist groups, “Suhail Khan has life-long associations with Muslim Brotherhood organizations and operatives through his family and in his own right…Khan has serially lied about: demonstrable connections to Abdurahman Alamoudi; the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood front organizations his parents founded; his own ties to those organizations; and his work on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda. ..” [source, p. 9 CSP Briefing Paper]

Mitchell’s role in this matter is essential to understand, since it was her rather cavalier dismissal of the Center for Security Policy’s case regarding Norquist and Khan which provided both gentlemen with the undeserved appearance of propriety.

“It has come to our attention that you sent a memorandum dated September 21, 2011 to the Board of Directors of the American Conservative Union on which you serve. In it, you made certain representations concerning specific, serious charges by Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. concerning the conduct of Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan…”

Thus it seems that Mitchell had assumed an advocacy role on behalf of Norquist and Khan in an attempt to clear the two from CSP’s serious allegations, with Mitchell being quoted from her memorandum to the ACU as follows:

“While there was substantial material regarding the activities of the various organizations, there was absolutely nothing contained in any of the materials that in any way linked Suhail (or Grover) to such organizations or their activities...With respect to Mr. Gaffney’s allegations against Grover, those are purely and simply character assassination. I have reviewed everything that Mr. Gaffney has presented to substantiate his continuing venom against Grover – but it is apparent that there simply is no basis whatsoever for those attacks. If there were any such factual support, Mr. Gaffney would have produced it years ago. It doesn’t exist…”

Mitchell characterized her review of the evidence, stating, “I have conducted fairly substantial due diligence on this matter,” an odd turn of phrase when all that was necessary was to make an unequivocal claim that her review had been exhaustive and hence a demonstrative exercise of genuine “due diligence,” absent the adjectival qualifiers.

In closing we find the Gaffney/CSP Study a powerful indictment of Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan’s activities in support of an Islamist campaign targeting the political right.

The sheer weight of the evidence, the enumeration of source documents and the prestige of this document’s signatories including but certainly not limited to ex Director of Central Intelligence, James Woolsey, all lend weight to the argument which the CSP is advancing.

We suggest that if the American Conservative Union were to engage in a full-scale review of this matter in the presence of Cleta Mitchell and Frank Gaffney that Ms. Mitchell’s contention that the evidence provided within the CSP report is not probative as to the dark nature of Norquist and Khan’s activities within the GOP power structure would immediately be seen as without basis, leaving Norquist and Khan exposed as fraudulent conservatives with troubling associations.